Hi All!
Hi All!
I'm planning a trip for later this year and into 2011 travelling to several different ares of the world (Western+Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Western Africa). I am thinking about getting an iPhone to take with me, primarily for internet access, but also as a phone for emergencies, and to keep in touch with home.
Does anyone have experience with taking an iPhone travelling? Do I need to get different SIM cards like a regular cell phone? And are the international charges outrageous?
Thanks for any help and advice!
-Cass
I wish I had a very simple answer for you on this, but it's going to be quite complex. So, if you buy an iPhone from an authorized vendor in U.S., Canada, or most countries around the world, it's going to be locked to the carrier you buy it from/with. There are only a handful of countries that have vendors that sell .
Now...it is possible to unlock cell phones that have been SIM-locked by a vendor...through a process known as jail breaking. But, not all jailbreaks will unlock the phone, and not all software/firmware versions of the iPhones have jailbreaks available.
You can purchase unlocked iPhones online from sites like ebay, but they are all unauthorized dealers and if the unlock came from a jailbreak there is basically no tech support for you.
My advice is that unless you are pretty tech saavy, it might be easier to get an unlocked smart phone from another brand and use that (and this is coming from a very happy iPhone user of 1.5 years).
Now, looking at cell/data plans. It really depends. In the Middle East/West Africa, it might be best to just buy a local SIM and add credit on it (for both voice and data). But in Europe, I'm not really sure what is the best option for having a SIM that works in most of the countries AND has affordable data/voice rates. You really will have to look at a country by country basis and see what carriers are available.
I took a smart phone (not an iPhone) to East Africa and Europe last summer. The phone worked great in East Africa and data/voice rates were pretty cheap. But when i got to Europe, I ended up getting one of those multi-country SIMs and the data/voice rates were pretty expensive.
The iPhone also has WiFI on it, but if that's all you plan to use, I would just take an iPod touch and use a cheap international cell. Good luck!
[ 25-Apr-2010, at 16:18 by ajf200 ]
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